Pregistered movie-fMRI analyses reveal altered visual feature encoding in autism in pSTS

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Autism Research

Background:

• Sensory-perceptual differences are common in autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
• The neural mechanisms underlying these differences are not well understood.
• Previous theories proposed enhanced sensory processing in autism.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the neural basis of sensory-perceptual differences in autism using naturalistic stimuli.
• To test hypotheses regarding enhanced versus altered perceptual functioning in autistic individuals.
• To examine how visual and auditory feature encoding differs in children with and without autism.

Main Methods:

• Utilized stacked encoding models on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data.
• Analyzed brain activity during naturalistic movie viewing in children and adolescents.
• Mapped cortical responses to low-level and high-level auditory and visual features.

Main Results:

• Autism was not linked to increased low-level sensory encoding in primary sensory areas.
• Autistic individuals showed reduced high-level visual representations.
• A shift towards low-level over high-level feature encoding was observed in social/multisensory brain regions, correlating with social responsiveness scores.

Conclusions:

• Findings support weak central coherence theory over early sensory enhancement in autism.
• Altered visual feature weighting within social/multisensory networks is a key mechanism.
• Naturalistic stimuli and encoding models are valuable for studying neurodevelopmental differences in sensory perception.